


heroes and songs

by zeitgeistofnow



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: (and kinda yue???), (it's tui), Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Sparring, Spirit World, Spirits, both of those are kind of stretches it's not that angsty but yeah, um the spirits are lesbians ur honor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26504536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeitgeistofnow/pseuds/zeitgeistofnow
Summary: “i’ve never heard that story,” says the other girl. “i guess you miss a lot of legends when you spend millennia as a fish.” she finally looks up from yue’s drawings to meet her eyes. the girl’s eyes are dark and infinite, like staring into the depths of the ocean.yue knows who she is, suddenly, recognises those eyes from years sitting at the spirit oasis and wondering who she would become.“la,” she says softly. “it’s good to meet you.”
Relationships: La/Yue (Avatar)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 58





	heroes and songs

**Author's Note:**

> sdklajdlkj okay right off the bat: this is canon compliant MOSTLY. there are some little details (mostly about la's life) that i changed and i'll talk abt that in the end notes but don't like. get mad that i was wrong lol

The first thing Yue notices about the Spirit World is that it’s neither warm nor cold, but not some combination of the two and not something in the middle. It’s just… nothing. When she looks up there’s no stars, no sun, and somehow a bright sky nonetheless, smoothness like on the days when the sky is just a field of clouds that stretches on as far as Yue can see. 

The second thing she notices is the only other person around, standing on the pale sand in bare feet, wind murmuring through her hair. She stands tall, brown hair tied up in a men’s warrior haircut with two short strings of beads falling from the front, and the careful tattoos on her face are ones that Yue remembers from the oldest elders of her tribe, coming of age traditions that couldn’t be continued when the invasion of the Fire Nation cut the Water Tribes off from the rest of the world. Her clothes are similar to Sokka’s traveling clothes, woven fabric in a deep blue that Yue doesn’t think could be achievable with any dye. She doesn’t look any older than Yue, face still holding onto the last dredges of childish fat, eyes without the wisdom that comes with age. 

She doesn’t look at Yue, just out at the rough ocean that doesn’t quite seem to splash either of them, even as Yue is standing close enough to the water to feel damp sand between her toes. The expression on her face is one of rage like Yue has never seen, the kind that should come with screaming and violence but doesn’t accompany anything but balled fists and the raging ocean.

Yue stands there for a few more moments, unsure of whether she should speak, unsure of what she’s done, really, what happened to bring her here. The other girl doesn’t react to her presence, though, and eventually Yue wanders off.

She sleeps for… she doesn’t know how long, only that whenever she wakes up it’s twilight, only that she can never find the energy to do anything but drift back to sleep. She remembers curling up in the sand, not minding when the grittiness of it pressed against her cheek and spilled into the sleeves of her dress. She remembers waking on something softer and more familiar than the thousand grains of translucent stones.

When she finally wakes up- for real this time, not just a haze of warmth that dissipates back into the nothingness of sleep- she sits and stretches and rubs nonexistent sleep crud from her eyes before realizing that she’s not in her home, that the ice room she’s in has a few key differences. The pelts beneath her are from an animal with thicker fur than Yue is used to and the ice is older than any Yue’s ever seen, so clear and blue that if she looks hard enough she can see the ocean in it. There’s still cool sand beneath her feet and when she presses her hand to the ice walls she can’t feel the familiar cold stinging her bare fingers, only the glossiness of frozen water. 

The air smells clean and sharp, and she breathes as deeply as she can before standing up. It takes a moment to become properly reoriented with the way her body moves after being asleep, and she finds every movement a little bit more fluid, a little softer than she remembers from earth. She reaches up into her hair to find her ties, tangled between strands of hair and knotted in odd places. Braiding and separating her hair is almost second nature to her after sixteen years of it and she does it quickly enough that she’s finished with everything but gently adjusting her braids by the time she notices the trio of simple leather ties left on a nearby table. 

She remembers, suddenly, the girl on the beach. 

When she finally finishes her hair again, the leather ties new and tight at the base of her hair loops and her braids, it’s still twilight and Yue’s entire being itches for the outdoors.

The doorway of the room is covered in a single large fur and opens into a familiar empty ice landscape that melts into sand and then infinite ocean, devoid of the glacial break-offs Yue is used to from her sparse trips to the sea. There’s a slowly dying fire a few yards from the door, and nothing to be seen for miles except scraggling brush and empty sky. 

It’s only seeing the sky again, moonless and calm and in a cool twilight, that makes Yue truly understand that she will never be able to go back, that she is… dead? Gone? Makes her understand that her loved ones will never see her again, that she will never grow old with her tribe, will never assume a place next to her father and will never take the chiefdom. 

Yue’s mother told her once that it rains when spirits cry. Yue thinks it’s strange that the way of expressing her rage, her grief, that was the least destructive in life has the capacity to create downpours now. She just hopes Sokka and his family don’t get caught in it. 

It’s an eternity of twilight before Yue sees the other girl again. Yue goes hunting in the inbetween and carves endless murals into the ice with an ulu found somewhere in the house, used to skin the jackalopes she hunts and then cleaned carefully in the snow. 

The girl reappears at twilight, walking across the ice like she has somewhere to be and then stopping in front of Yue’s fire like it wasn’t her goal but still something she would settle for, comfort in the middle of a long journey. Yue offers her a bowl of jackalope stew, which she accepts wordlessly, folding herself cross-legged on the other side of the flickering fire.

She looks tireder than before, dark circles under her eyes and a weariness to the way she eats that Yue feels in her bones. Somehow Yue can see the long-wiped away tear tracks down her cheeks just as easily as she can see the tattooed lines across them, and it makes her want to offer comfort in any way she can.

“More?” She offers, gesturing at the fire. The girl shakes her head. With one hand, fingers stubby and nails carefully trimmed, she traces the lines of Yue’s stories, folk tales her mother used to tell her. Yue’s not much of an artist, but she’s always liked etchings, the feeling of a knife in her hands, the light resistance of new ice. 

“What stories are these?” Her pointer finger scratches lightly at the eye of the polar bear dog, the slight divot where Yue’s knife had dug too deep. When Yue blinks, the mistake is gone. 

“The woman and the polar bear dog,” Yue says, gesturing at the illustrations of the lonely woman, then of the women and her bear, then of the men in the village with boomerangs and spears, then of the bear again, shining and curled happily around his mother. “My… my mother used to tell me this story. It was my favorite, because it reminded me of a woman in my tribe.”

Yugoda had had a polar bear dog for as long as Yue remembers, a huge animal that followed her to meetings that her husband, had she ever had one, would come to. 

Yue liked the story too because it said that she didn’t need a family, didn’t need someone at her side except those that she chose. She envied the woman in the story, loved by all and loving all, but never giving more than she wanted to.

Yue wonders how Yugoda is doing. How everyone is doing. She doesn’t know much time has passed since the Fire Nation invaded her home, can’t even begin to guess at it with the eternal twilight surrounding her. 

“I’ve never heard it,” says the other girl. “I guess you miss a lot of legends when you spend millennia as a fish.” She finally looks up from Yue’s drawings to meet her eyes. The girl’s eyes are dark and infinite, like staring into the depths of the ocean. 

Yue knows who she is, suddenly, recognises those eyes from years sitting at the spirit oasis and wondering who she would become.

“La,” she says softly. “It’s good to meet you.”

La doesn’t smile, just blinks and raises her empty bowl of soup. “Thanks, Yue.”

La sleeps sprawled by the fire, still in the stages between roaring and dead, just as it has been for as long as Yue has been here. Yue sleeps inside the house, curled up between pelts. When Yue asks, La says that the pelts were given to her by the Tiger Monkey Spirit, tricked out from between his paws. She says that nothing can be truly hunted in the spirit world, that everything must be created and given by a spirit. She says that Yue’s jackalope stew was a gift, or maybe a trick, and Yue feels childish and dumb. La says that she will stay to teach Yue, but there is pain in her eyes that tells Yue that she won’t stay after that.

The bed is La’s. Yue knows that Tui used to sleep in it too.

La throws Yue’s hunting spear at her first thing in the morning and the weapon feels solid in Yue’s hand, weighty and light all at the same time. Yue doesn’t remember the spear coming into the spirit world with her, but it’s unmistakably the same one from home.

La holds a spear too, although beyond the basics of the weapon there’s almost nothing in common between Yue’s and La’s. Her spear is longer and looks heavier in her hands, made of solid wood and tipped with an oddly shaped bone, one whose smooth edges and sharp tip looks like it was made to head a spear.

“Let’s go,” La says, “show me what you can do.”

Yue instinctively adjusts her hold on the spear to a sparring one, squares her shoulders and steadies her feet, then blinks and relaxes again, lowering the spear she’d pointed at La. What is she doing, pointing a spear at the ocean. “I- sorry, what?” 

La tosses her a smile- the first one Yue’s gotten from the other woman- and mirrors Yue’s fighting stance. “C’mon, Yue, show me what you’ve got.”

Yue’s never sparred very much at all, and certainly not since she was young enough to still play-fight with the other children in the tribe, so she fights like she’s chasing a buffalo yak, something fast but not likely to fight back. La knocks her off her feet in no more than a few seconds, Yue’s lunge forward putting her off balance and La’s graceful dodge letting her fall to the ice. 

Yue doesn’t groan at the impact of her elbow on ground, just allows herself a slight wince and a moment of readjusting her hair loops to disguise the moment she needs to take to catch her breath again. 

La watches her and offers a hand once Yue finishes with her hair. Yue accepts it and stands with her feet grounded in the snow. La stands in front of her, a few inches shorter, one hand on her hips and the other on her spear. “You don’t spar much,” she says, a slight frown creasing her face.

Yue sighs. “No, I don’t.”

“I didn’t think so.” La reaches out to finger the tip of Yue’s spear, running her hands over the nicks and scrapes of the bone. “Your spear is for hunting. Speed.”

“Women don’t fight,” Yue says. 

La frown deepens and Yue looks at her hairstyle again, the wolf tail at the top of her head and the hair cascading over her shoulders, smooth and thick even though Yue hasn’t seen her take care of it since they met. The beads near her face tell of a life unfinished, a teenager torn from her tribe before she got to grow up even if Yue doesn’t know the true meaning behind each bead, and the hair itself speaks of a man. _Or_ , some part of Yue suggests, _maybe not a man but a warrior._

“Well,” La finally says, “you are no longer a woman, you are a spirit.” She wraps her hand around the spear, just above where Yue grips it, and gently takes it from her. “Fighting can wait. You will need to learn, still. Tui was left defenseless and the world can’t lose another moon spirit.”

 _Neither can I_ is left unsaid, but Yue hears it anyway.

They walk across the land as the glacier turns to tundra and the tundra to the edges of a great forest. La strides, short legs taking her faster than Yue thinks she should be able to walk, but the distance between the two never stretches further than a foot or two. La says that if Yue is to be left alone in the Spirit World she needs to know how to protect herself. She says that there are more than one way to protect yourself, and that if Yue doesn’t yet know how to fight she needs to know how to speak.

When Yue comments on the eternal twilight, La says that time passes differently in the Spirit World. She says that it isn’t always twilight, but that the world is frozen until Yue is ready to sit in the sky nightly. She says they have time.

Yue almost can’t quite believe the idea that she can take as long as she wants. 

The Tiger Monkey Spirit sits tall and proud in its tree and La and Yue have to look up to meet his eyes. His ears are those of a tiger, pointed at the tips, and his body that of a striped monkey. The only difference between a tiger monkey and the Tiger Monkey Spirit is the knowingness in his eyes, a twinkle that only comes with consciousness. La has to explain this to Yue because Yue has never seen a tiger monkey in life, only the same endless parade of buffalo yak and polar bear dogs. 

Still, now that she sees him in front of them, it’s apparent that no mortal animal has the same cunning glint he does. 

“Chief of the sea,” he purrs, “of the briny ocean depths. You’re looking particularly salty today, I could almost taste it in my tea this morning.”

La had said that the Tiger Monkey Spirit only speaks in riddles and trickery. She said that Yue would have to learn how to talk to him, that if she couldn’t beat dangers with her spear her words would have to do. 

The muscles in La’s neck tense when she grins. “Fool of the trees, trickster of the great, you’re looking especially like _meat,_ so I would suggest keeping your two sided words to yourself.” It’s a smile that Yue’s not familiar with, gleeful and sharp. La looks like she’s back in a rhythm she hadn’t even realized she’d missed, a dance she falls into easily. There’s a grace to their words, traded back and forth with a practiced mocking.

The Tiger Monkey Spirit swings down closer to them. His fur is even finer up close, glossy in an unrealistic way like the ink paintings Yue has seen, ones that were imported from the Earth Kingdom before the war started. He doesn’t even spare Yue a glance, too focused on La. 

“Particularly reckless, too,” he says, mouth moving in a way that shouldn’t produce words from an animal, “didn’t Tui ever tell you to be careful around me?”

The Tiger Monkey Spirit can take your mind, your soul, but only if you agree to it. There’s a careful way you’re meant to talk to him and Yue thinks that it’s built into their dance, but La’s eyes flash at the mention of Tui and she falls out of step with the beat, not stumbling so much as going too fast, trying to trip her partner before falling herself. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel like a dance at all so much as it feels like a fight, two opponents walking circles around each other to see who lets their guard up first.

Yue sees the way the Tiger Monkey Spirit looks at La, like a puzzle. She sees the way La watches him back, like prey. 

Yue knows the flip side of fighting something like prey- she relearned it just this morning. When you hardly think your opponent capable of striking back, you hardly think of protecting yourself. 

She’s heard stories of Tui and La and the Tiger Monkey Spirit, of the wariness in the eyes of the moon spirit when she talks to him, the way Tui has to hold back La’s tides of anger at the spirit’s tricks. The stories always end with the same moral: _keep your emotions to yourself when talking to spirits. Anger and joy makes you rash._

La steps closer to the Tiger Monkey Spirit and Yue remembers the tear tracks catching at her jaw, the rage she’d seen in La’s face that first night on the beach. “Tui told me a lot of things,” she says, grin turning even more dangerous, less like a smile. “Like about how you’re a cowardly, sneaky little rat who uses pretty words because he can’t go and fight for himself with the big girls. She said that-” La seems to realize that if she stabs at the Tiger Monkey Spirit too much more she’ll leave herself open to attack and she stops.

The Tiger Monkey Spirit leans closer too, eyes gleeful and conniving. He sees what Yue sees, the way their dance has devolved into a clumsy footed fight. “Oh, no, tell me, spouse of the sky, pilgrim of the horizon. What else did Tui tell you?”

“She told me that one day your _skin_ would be a pelt on my wall, that the jester of the cunning will one day fall under his own _ridiculous_ hubris.” La stabs at the spirit with one finger and he laughs. 

“What else did she tell you? That you would be together forever?” the Tiger Monkey Spirit suggests, voice still silky smooth. “That you are eternal, young until the stars fall from their thrones? The moon _lies,_ master of the tides.”

“That was never a title of mine, king of the true myths,” Tui says, her voice a snarl. She doesn’t argue, though, doesn’t insist that Tui would only tell the truth. “You’re confusing Tui and I again, getting soft.”

The spirit pays her no mind, just makes a quietly sad face and stops a little bit closer. “Don’t you wish you could be with her again. I could take you there,” the Tiger Monkey Spirit says softly, “reunited once again. You are just a child, you don’t deserve to be alone. I could-”

La opens her mouth and Yue can almost hear the hoarse admittance, the _please_ that would allow the Tiger Monkey to steal her away. She can see the moment La forgets their weapons, forgets the dance-turned-battle, only remembers the ritual of Tui and La.

“We should go,” Yue says softly, putting a hesitant palm on La’s back and meeting the Tiger Monkey Spirit’s eyes for the first time this meeting. La tenses at the touch and Yue snatches her hand away like she’d been burnt. The Tiger Monkey Spirit’s eyes catch on the movement, but he doesn’t seem to care very much.

“Oh, little girl,” he says, “didn’t anyone tell you that it’s rude to steal away someone’s dinner? I was so very close to having something to eat tonight, I can hardly let you walk away with her.”

Yue feels her eyes harden. She’s never been good at dancing or fighting, but she can stand her guard, let people spin circles around her. “I think we should go,” she repeats.

“Don’t try to protect me, Tui- Yue,” La says finally, straightening and taking a step forward. In one smooth movement she draws her spear and uses the butt of it to knock the Tiger Monkey Spirit off his tree branch, sending him sprawling into spiderwebs of vines. He tangles in them immediately, and La’s self-satisfied smile says that even though he will survive, the irritation of the next hour is enough revenge for her. “That’s my job.”

“Again,” La says once they’re back at her home. She tosses Yue the spear. “Sparring stance.”

Yue stands steadily and holds her spear the way she remembers seeing the men of her tribe grip it, one hand higher and the other gripping the base of the spear, pointing it forward. The tip feels off-balance, like one bad push would send her toppling over. La steps up behind her and places one hand on her shoulder and the other at her waist, minutely adjusting her stance. She shows her how to jab without baring her weak side, how to sidestep and dodge.

Then, finally, she stands across from Yue with her own spear and readies herself to spar.

Yue loses, and loses, and loses.

They spend a couple of weeks of twilight together, Yue cooking rabbits that La rustles out- conjures?- from the bushes and La showing her how to fight. They don’t go to see the Tiger Monkey Spirit again, and they slowly graduate from simple instruction to stories after they eat to La’s sly jokes as she beats Yue in spear fight after spear fight. Yue tries to guess if she’s ready to find her place in the sky again, to let time continue to pass, and each time she doesn’t know.

La says that’s the same thing as not being ready. 

After sparring one day, hot and sweaty despite the ice surrounding them, Yue asks why La wears her hair like a man- like a warrior, she corrects at the last moment.

They both lay sprawled out, spears clattered on the ground next to them. La doesn’t seem surprised by Yue asking questions, even if neither has shared anything more personal than their mother’s lullabies. 

Her hair looks gorgeous, framing a handsome face and sometimes, when Yue can’t fall asleep, she watches La wash her hair through the window next to the bed. The other woman walks all the way to the ocean and waterbends the salt out of the freezing cold water before massaging it through her thick hair. 

Yue’s hair doesn’t require any upkeep, silvery strands keeping their silkiness no matter how long she does without washing it, but La still brings her bath water and heats it over the fire, politely leaving to hunt while Yue bathes. 

La floofs her hair absently and Yue waits for an answer. “Because I’m a warrior,” she says finally, sounding just a little like a child dressing in their father’s war paint. 

“You’re just my age,” Yue counters. Even Sokka still wore his hair shaved on the sides.

“We’ll, I’m never going to get any older, am I?” La snaps. She props herself up on her elbows and Yue has to look up to see her. Yue doesn’t mind. She just likes looking at La. “I took _myself_ ice dodging, I did my own tattoos, _I_ chose when I became a warrior instead of a child. I might never be older, I might always feel seventeen, but I can fight and _have_ fought just as well as some of the jackasses you call warriors.”

Yue stares up at the sky. The duskiness seems to whisper that the first stars will appear soon, but the stars are weeks and weeks late and Yue knows that they are waiting for her. “I’ll never get to grow up,” she says quietly. “I’ll never be a woman.”

“No,” La says, “forever young isn’t as fun as it sounds.” She collapses back down and turns on her side to face Yue. Yue turns too, head resting on her forearm. La’s eyes are bright blue-green, oceans within them. Within her. “It’s easier with someone else, though. I’m sorry- I’m sorry I have to leave. I just can’t-”

“It’s okay,” Yue interrupts, although it isn’t. It’s not okay, but she won’t think about it until the moment comes that they will part ways. Yue _understands,_ she sees the way La looks at her and searches for someone else, but she’s selfish enough to not want to be alone. “Tell me about your beads,” she says, gingerly reaching out to run her fingers over them. The oldest ones, furthest back on her head, are wooden and faded, and the closest three are silver and blue glass, with one at the bottom a red-orange like fire, brash against the others. 

La brings her hand up to her braids too and brushes against Yue’s fingers for just a moment before Yue draws her hand back. La points at the wooden ones, “My family. My father gave me these beads to give to my husband.” Her face goes bitter. “It used to be tradition to wear your wife’s family in beads, especially if she was an only child. I never- I never had a husband, of course, and I’m never going to, so I felt that I owed it to my family to wear them. To have someone remember them.”

Yue doesn’t want to think about her family. “And the other ones?”

“From the Tiger Monkey Spirit. Silver and blue for Tui and La, orange a condition from the spirit. To remind that it always ends in flames.” La must notice Yue’s sad expression and she smiles lopsidedly. “Not very happy memories, yeah, but it’s not about the joy, it’s about remembering the people I love.”

“I don’t want to forget anyone,” Yue says softly, “not ever.”

“No one ever does.” There’s a moment of silence, half-contemplative and half-sleepy. Finally, La grunts and jumps to her feet, offering Yue a hand. “C’mon, we’re not done sparring.”

La fights when she’s sad or angry, and Yue can’t find the strength to take that from her, even though they were definitely done sparring. She takes La’s hand and lets the other girl pull her to her feet and she readies her spear. 

La wins. La always wins, spinning and full of anger and beauty all at the same time, fluidity in every step forward, every twitch of her fingers. Yue’s halting movements and quiet grief can’t even hold a candle.

When they stop again, La doesn’t collapse next to Yue, just takes her spear and twirls it absently. Even though Yue doesn’t use a hunting spear anymore, her sparring spear is lighter and faster than La’s. It doesn’t give her much of an advantage, just caters to her soft arms and lack of abs. “You lost again.”

Yue does her best not to pant, just tugs open her collar a little bit more and breathes. “Yeah. I always do.”

“You do.” La frowns. “I can’t leave you alone like this, you need someone to keep you safe.”

Yue thinks about the exchange with the Tiger Monkey Spirit, thinks about the nights when La sits long after her hair is finished drying, staring at an empty sky and refusing to cry, thinks about _don’t try to protect me, Tui,_ and she thinks that maybe La needs someone to keep her safe just as much. Thinks that maybe Yue doesn’t want to leave her.

Still, she doesn’t say that, and a moment later La snaps her fingers. “The woman- from your story, with the polar bear dog. I can take you to one. To keep you safe.”

Yue manages a quiet smile and doesn’t think about what will happen to La when she wanders into the forest with no one to hold back her snarl. “That sounds wonderful.”

“Yue,” La sings, voice lilting in a way that Yue’s only hears when the dying sun shines on them in just the right way, casting gold on La’s braids and Yue’s ears. It’s a good twilight, shining and holy, warm light and cool warmth telling Yue that her furs can be shrugged off as long as she stays close to the body heat of the other girl. 

“La,” Yue sings back and La reaches out to grab both her hands, tugging her out into the expanse of snow and spinning around and around and around. Yue giggles automatically at the dip her stomach does. La’s hands are rough and warm and she grins like there’s nothing in the world but the now. 

“Do you sing in the Water Tribes anymore?” She asks, pulling Yue closer to her to slow their spinning. Her biceps flex as she pulls against the centrifugal force keeping them apart and Yue only barely avoids stumbling. 

“Of course,” Yue says automatically, taking a tiny step away from La but keeping their hands linked. “Everyone sings.” She worries, just for a moment, that La will take offence at the immediate rebuke, but the other girl seems unbothered.

La shrugs. “Hey, just asking. A lot has changed since I was really there.” She raises an eyebrow. “You don’t know any sailing songs, though, do you?”

Yue shakes her head.

La laughs, more a kind of joy than humor. “My dad used to sing these when he took my sailing when I was very young. It’s a game, actually, but we don’t have to play it, just…” She looks hopefully at Yue, “dance with me?”

Yue loves dancing, the wind in her hair and the way her feet can move as quickly as she wants as long as she knows where they’ll step next. She loves dancing dresses and she loves watching the other girls of her tribe dance, the way their eyes flutter closed and their smiles betray the same freedom Yue feels, the kind of happiness Yue shares with them when they dance. “Of course,” she says. 

They fall into the dance easily, a kind of spinning informal dance that Yue doesn’t remember ever participating in. Her feet remember, though, and she follows La’s lead as easily as breathing. 

_“I’ve got eyes like brown moonstone,”_ La starts, voice like she’s telling a joke, _“And a wit like a cracking whip. To fits of laughter I am prone, so close your eyes and lean close for a kiss.”_ She spins Yue as she sings- and it’s not singing, really, so much as it’s melodic speaking. Yue laughs, exhilarated and dizzy, and half-collapses against La. The other girl is solid and doesn't seem to mind Yue leaning on her. 

“You’re not _so_ clever,” Yue says finally. “Not enough to put it in a song.”

“Song’s not about me, moonchild,” La says. “That’s the game. You sing it about the object of your desires, or whoever you want, really, and everyone else has to guess who you’re singing about.” She laughs, a little self-consciously. “It works better when there’s more than two people around. You go, now. I feel like you’d be a good lyricist. Tui was always good at this game.”

Yue can imagine the two of them, waltzing across the ice and singing songs about each other. 

“I- I don’t have-” Yue thinks, suddenly, of Sokka and his funny way of talking that almost always managed to tease a smile out of her. She could sing about him, she thinks, but something about it doesn’t seem quite right. The Spirit World is full of tricking honesty, but not lies.

“It doesn’t have to be the love of your life,” La says. “Make someone up.”

 _“My biceps are as strong as the strongest stone,”_ Yue starts, breaking into a grin as La starts to hum along and spin her, arms flexing as they dip close to each other and apart, _“And when I smile the moon would fall.”_ La pulls her closer than usual and their noses almost meet as they both lose the beat of the music. La’s eyes are as dark as they were the first time Yue saw her, but there’s something twinkling behind them that was dimmed in the days after Tui’s death. It makes Yue’s breath catch in her throat. 

La smiles up at her and Yue wraps a tentative hand through the back of her hair. It feels coarse between her fingers, but smooth. 

_“When I fight I fight with a spear of bone,”_ Yue continues, a part of her worrying that the song is nudging itself closer to telling a truth that Yue is only just realizing is true. Some part of La lights up at the last few verses and she puts both hands on Yue’s back so that they’re twined around each other. Breathing the same air, Sokka would call it, tender in its simple intimacy. 

“Yue-” La starts. Yue looks away, even if it’s the last thing that she wants to do.

 _“But my last love I still recall,”_ she finishes quietly. 

Yue sleeps a dozen times more before the next time she sees La come back from washing her hair late, face salty with either the ocean or tears, something about her peaceful expression that betrays shatteredness below the surface. 

This time, Yue slips out of bed, still in her sleeping clothes and her hair down around her shoulders, and walks out to near the fire, hovering just within La’s sight.

When La looks up, her eyes are cloudy with sleepiness and she is lit only by the still-dying embers of their fire. “Tui?” She whispers, voice hoarse. “Did you come back?”

Yue just sits down next to La and doesn’t say anything when the other girl falls asleep with her head in Yue’s lap. 

When Yue wakes up again, La is safely on the other side of the fire, scraping a map into the ice in front of her. At Yue’s sleepy inquiring noise, La says, “Today, we find you a protector. I can’t be responsible for your blood, too.”

They walk in a different direction from where they had gone to find the Tiger Monkey Spirit, through what feels like miles of tundra that melts into hours of lichen covered rock which climbs up and up until snow dusts the top of the rock again. La says that the gray basalt under them means that there used to be a volcano here, says that she learned it from the owl’s library. 

“The owl’s?” Yue asks. Her boots accumulate a layer of snow on the toes and when she stops it falls away, only to be replaced in her next step. 

“Wan Shi Tong,” La says, spinning around and gesturing grandly. The journey seems to have put her in better spirits, and Yue has to admit she feels better too, rid of a pressing anxiety she hadn’t realized she was holding. “It’s huge, every story the world’s ever told is in there. Wan Shi Tong took it back to the mortal world after I became a fish, so I haven’t been there in…” She starts to count up on her fingers, such an incredibly _Sokka_ gesture that Yue has to hide a fond smile, “uh. Thousands and thousands of years, thousands of reigns, an eternity.”

Yue sighs wistfully. “I wonder what stories it has now. That sounds like something Sokka would love.”

La quirks an eyebrow. “Sokka? You’ve never mentioned anyone at home.”

Yue startles a little, distressed at the sudden realization that after the first few days, after the overwhelming feeling of loss, she hasn’t spent more than a moment missing anyone from her home. She only missed the solidity, the warmth that came with them, never the small things that made them people. “He’s from the Southern Water Tribe, and he smiles like he could hold the moon in his arms.” Yue feels her eyes go faraway and a quiet smile spread across her face. She _does_ miss Sokka, even if she’d barely known him, even if sometimes it had felt like going through the motions. It always did, and at least Sokka made it fun. 

La kicks at the snow and it arcs through the air. She smiles playfully, an expression that Yue has only seen for fleeting moments on her face and only while sparring. “Your smile tells me that he’s certainly held the moon _spirit,_ right?”

The way she smiles, the way she talks so easily of _holding,_ of being held, of the warmth of love, makes Yue think about dancing around the fire, of singing sailor songs. Either La doesn’t think the same thing or she’s better at hiding her thoughts. Yue thinks either option is about as likely.

Yue quiets and La’s playful expression disappears as fast as it always does, replaced by something more knowing. 

“I had someone like Sokka,” she says tentatively, another tone Yue’s never heard from her. Some part of her warms at the idea that La would soften her edges around Yue, would try to keep from hurting her. “He talked like the ocean couldn’t slip through his fingers and he liked to tell me stories about the stars. We were going to be married even though we didn’t love eachother in the way they talk about in stories.”

The stories of love that Yue remembers are the ones of Tui and La, but she doesn’t say that.

“We just cared about each other more than anyone else,” La says, “and sometimes that feels like love.” She shrugs. “Maybe it was, but it never held a candle to how I felt about-”

“Her?” Yue finishes quietly. La shoots her a dry smile.

“I thought you would understand,” she says. 

Yue closes her eyes for just a moment, trying to regret drawing parallels between herself and La, La and Tui. trying to regret revealing- maybe more than she meant to. Maybe more than she ever has, but she can’t find it in herself to believe that it was the wrong thing to say, that it should have stayed hidden. “I do.”

The Polar Bear Dog Spirit is found at the top of the hill, one that had quickly gone from gently sloping to an angle that would have made Yue keel over, were she not in the Spirit World. He is sitting with his tail curled around his back legs, staring up into the sky. 

“La,” he says without looking back, “how nice to see you.”

“Nanuk,” La greets, padding through the snow to sit, cross-legged, in front of him. Yue sits in a similar fashion next to her and Nanuk finally looks down at them.

He’s one of the most regal animals Yue’s ever seen, with fur that almost glows in the twilight around them and dark brown eyes. Meeting his gaze feels irreverent, but something reminds Yue that she is just as powerful as anyone else here, now, and La’s voice insists that she bow for no one she doesn’t need to. Something about Nanuk tells Yue he wouldn’t appreciate the show of submission, anyway. 

“I am sorry for your loss,” Nanuk says, looking back to La. His voice is smooth and deep, like the old man who would tell stories at festivals when Yue was young. “The world has lost a great woman.”

“I’m sorry for yours,” La responds. Some of her rage seems to cool around the spirit, but in a calmed way, not a suffocating one. “I heard your mourning for weeks, and I am sorry I never approached you to help.” When Yue looks at her profile, soft and wearing an expression that she knows is imposing but at some point started to just look familiar, she hears the addition: _I’m sorry I let her go. I’m sorry I failed._

“We all have our own struggles, and often we don’t have the strength to calm others,” Nanuk says gently, “there is no need to apologize.” His gaze turns to Yue once again and somehow she doesn’t feel the need to shrink beneath it. “You seem to have been busy in the meantime, anyway. This is Yue?”

“Yes,” Yue says. “I am here to ask your protection,” she says, rolling the words around in her mouth. They don’t taste quite how they should, and she can tell Nanuk notices.

“The stars wait for your safety, hm,” he says, and blinks once, slowly. The stories of Nanuk that Yue has heard always involve the stars, the Polar Bear Dog chasing them over the horizon, herding them back into the constellations so that sailors will know how to sail home. “You are taking your time to become the moon,” and it doesn’t sound judgemental. 

“I need to be ready,” Yue says.

“She needs to be _safe,”_ La insists. 

“She is safe,” Nanuk says. He sounds like he is explaining something to someone who has heard the explanation a thousand times and had listened but never quite internalized the lesson. His brow furrows, casting light gray shadow. “Unless you had other plans, persuader of the waves.”

La finally looks away, face shifting from an impassive diplomat to a petulant teenager. “I- you don’t understand. I failed the first time, but you won’t. You can keep her safe, just like how you used to keep Tui.”

Nanuk’s face softens and he reaches a single paw to place over La’s hand. “Why do you think I left Tui with you, then? You need a protector just as much as she did, La, and her death was no more your fault than it was Yue’s. If you held a duty to her you hold the same to Yue, and if you didn’t then your guilt is baseless and you should be allowed to move on.”

La scowls. “Don’t call it _duty,_ I- I loved her, more than I’ve never- than-” She chokes on nothing and Yue feels herself move closer, wrap a quiet arm around La and let the other girl tuck her face into her shoulder. 

Nanuk’s voice is deep and wise and meets Yue’s eyes, even as he talks to La. “If your love is not duty, your loss is not failure,” he says gently. There’s a moment, the only sounds passing between the three are quiet breathing and the whistling of the wind. Nanuk turns minutely to look at La and the other girls lfts her face slightly. “And Yue is not Tui, even if you look at her the same way,” Nanuk finishes. Some flash of understanding crosses La’s face, guilt and relief all in one.

Finally, Nanuk nods to Yue, an apology for his rejection and a goodbye all in one, and plods away down the mountain. His footprints half-fill almost as soon as he leaves them behind, smooth indents in the snowy landscape. 

Between Yue’s arms, La starts to weep.

They sit on the mountain for Yue-doesn’t-know-how long, warm in their closeness. It doesn’t feel awkward, just safe. La stops crying when Yue starts and by the time they’ve both dried their eyes snowflakes frost their eyelashes.

“I can’t believe it’s really over,” La says softly, dancing her fingers through the fluffy snow. “I just- for thousands of years, it was just us. Tui and La.”

Dancing across the night sky, the eternal push and pull. Yue knows.

“It’s hard to move on,” La continues. Her knees are pulled up to her chest and Yue is wrapped around her, Yue’s head resting on the shorter girl’s shoulder and her arms around La’s waist. She leans back against Yue and Yue feels every point of contact like a heavy blanket, contentedness washing over her like the ocean. “I thought-” La stares studiously at the snow. “I thought you would be like her, or that you would try to be like her, but you’re not. And I didn’t know how to _be_ without her, because I’ve never had to. I think I wanted to be her for you, because I never would have survived without her there to keep me safe, but I couldn’t even do that and I was _so scared_ of messing up and having you be stolen too-” The end of the sentence is obscured by a choked sob. 

Yue wraps her arms a little tighter and hums softly, giving La the moment to calm and start again.

“But I like _you,_ ” La says, “I like how you’re different than her. I like how you’re bad at fighting and how your voice sounds like the stars twinkling in the sky.”

“I like you too,” Yue says, and La offers her a weak smile. “I think we’re going to be just fine.”

“Yeah,” La says, then again, “yeah.”

They sit for a while, the tone having melted from grief to warmth, and when Yue looks up again, the dark blue sky is painted across with every color she can imagine, stars dotting nebulas that she’s never seen. The night finally making its appearance, an invitation to its primary feature. 

“Look," Yue whispers, awed. She’d forgotten how much she’d missed the stars since coming to the Spirit World, missed their shining constellations. “The stars are back.”

La looks up, then reaches for one of Yue’s hands and squeezes it. “Looks like they’re waiting for you.”

Yue stands, legs and arms protesting at the change in position. La stands with her, hair blowing in the wind and beaded braids clacking against one another. She stands the same way she had that day on the beach, stoic and strong, but there’s a quiet smile on her face that Yue thinks must be worth more than all the gold in the world. 

“Are you ready?”

“I don’t know-” Yue starts to say, out of force of habit, but- “yes. I am.”

“Come back when the sun rises,” La says, quiet desperation hidden behind layers and layers of hopefulness, “promise?”

“Promise.” Yue can imagine it already- the ice house again, a fire finally no longer stuck in an eternal death but roaring to life, the sun finally rising in its warmth and glory. And La, looking at her and not a ghost of someone Yue would never meet.

“I’ll keep you safe,” La promises back, then smiles shyly up at Yue. “A kiss for good luck?” she says, and Yue is stunned enough that it takes her a moment to realize that La is asking.

“Yes,” she says quickly, “yes.”

The first thing Yue notices about the sky is nothing, too preoccupied with remembering the feeling of La’s mouth against hers, the way the other girl had grinned afterwards like she had just told Yue a secret that only the two of them knew. The way she had felt really and truly herself, the way that feeling hadn’t gone away.

The second thing she notices is that she feels _infinite._

**Author's Note:**

> \- first of all! the "canon divergence" was the fact that according to canon tui and la were born spirits and also that they became fish like. before humans started actually living on the planet and not the backs of lion turtles and DEFINITELY before the two tribes split. however, iiiiiii don't care. she's from the southern water tribe and became the ocean in a similar way yue did.  
> \- this is (partially) inspired by [this](https://nerdasami.tumblr.com/post/628269464867209216/the-way-the-ocean-moon-spirits-are-lesbians-and) post!! an incredible concept and i love it. it's also inspired by how all of the other la/yue fics had la as an adult man and i Don't Like That so i wrote this!!  
> \- also askfljd i rly forgot a summary again.. :P no thoughts head empty  
> \- as always, comments and kudos make so SO happy and you can find me on tumblr [@lazypigeon](lazypigeon)!!


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